Key Performance Indicators are typically displayed in a scorecard with stop light indicators, which are either red, amber or green light icons. The limitation for these kind of indicators is that you can see the actual and target values in two different fields as well as see the status of the KPI in red, amber or green color. If the user wants to figure out the thresholds associated with the KPI, these values are generally not visible. Further, representing the threshold values in the scorecard itself defeats the purpose of the scorecard. The scorecard should display the KPI's status in the most summarized form and use a minimal amount of space on the dashboard. In this tip we would look at how to address this issue.
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I'm looking at several new visualization features in SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services and the data bar looks like something that I could really use. Can you provide an example of how to use this in a report?
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Changes are inevitable and like many other things in life your application will change over time. The question is how to upgrade an already deployed Data Tier Application to a newer version; what are the different methods available for upgrade and what considerations should you take?
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Data warehousing and general reporting applications tend to be CPU intensive because they need to read and process a large number of rows. To facilitate quick data processing for queries that touch a large amount of data, Microsoft SQL Server exploits the power of multiple logical processors to provide parallel query processing operations such as parallel scans. Through extensive testing, we have learned that, for most large queries that are executed in a parallel fashion, SQL Server can deliver linear or nearly linear response time speedup as the number of logical processors increases. However, some queries in high parallelism scenarios perform suboptimally. There are also some parallelism issues that can occur in a multi-user parallel query workload. This white paper describes parallel performance problems you might encounter when you run such queries and workloads, and it explains why these issues occur. In addition, it presents how data warehouse developers can detect these issues, and how they can work around them or mitigate them.
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I noticed a new feature in SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services that allows you to render maps in your reports. Can you provide some details on this new feature and can I take advantage of it even though don't have any spatial columns in my data warehouse?
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SQL Server 2008 R2 Data-Tier Applications make database development, deployment and management much easier. When you create and build a Data Tier Application, it creates a single, self-contained unit of deployment called a DAC package. Arshad Ali shows you how to deploy the created DAC package and discusses the different methods of deployment.
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Transactional Replication is used when DML or DDL schema changes performed on an object of a database on one server needs to be reflected on the database residing on another server. This article provides a step by step guide to setting up transactional replication on SQL Server 2008 R2.
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We use Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) within the trusted domains, but use the Negotiate Security Support Provider for our web applications. What other security methods can we employ with SQL Server?
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Quietly, Microsoft has been making radical improvements to Reporting Services; but precisely what was introduced, and when? We asked Bill Pearson, the well-known BI expert, to come up with a definitive survey of the more recent changes and how they help the user of Reporting Services.
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